美国人物志:罗伯特·弗罗斯特 （二）（5/9)

英语自学网

罗伯特·弗罗斯特是20世纪最受欢迎的美国诗人。他曾赢得4次普利策奖和许多其他的奖励及荣誉，被称之为美国文学中的桂冠诗人。
Hints:
Robert Frost
New England
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Mending Wall"
frozen-ground-swell
abreast

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Frost was like an earlier New England writer and thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson. They never were good at joining others in programs or movements. Frost was politically conservative and avoided movements of the left or right. He did this not because he did not support their beliefs, but because they were group projects.
In the poem "Mending Wall" the speaker and his neighbor walk together along a wall, repairing the damage caused by winter weather:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun.
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill.
And on a day we meet and walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
The speaker questions his neighbor who says, "Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker says:
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.